Listening to: I Will Not Go Quietly - Don Henley

… the best and brightest. They are the greediest, they might have the potential of being the best and brightest - but they are greediest first and foremost.

What’s my point? When the forest fire is burning thru, you’ve got the wrong people manning the fire hoses.

Listening to: Long white Cross - Pluto

Over the past month or so every morning, as I eat breakfast, I have watched the Dow Jones thrash out it’s dying hours for the day. Every night I have watched the bobble-heads prognosticate - announcing this plan and that. The problem just gets worse and worse and the impotence of the experts becomes more and more apparent. To me that signifies that we’re seeing something new with this current economic crisis, I think it’s a problem more complex than anything we’ve experienced to date - by many orders of magnitude. We have created a system so complex that we can no longer control it and turning off the switch is no longer an option.

The most interesting thing, for me, is what it tells us about our future. We’re going to see more of these Category 5 storms - we’re going to have to learn how to manage them. It’s crushingly apparent that the so called batch of “best and brightest” are not up to the job. This is not is not a free-market vs. government thing, it’s an “understanding complexity” thing.

Every six months or so I listen to this speech by Bruce Sterling… it keeps things in perspective. But one of his key arguments about the singularity as a non-event is that we haven’t seen existing networks (electricity and water) become self-aware. What we’re seeing now, though, is a hint of a system (human and technological) getting reaching a point where we can no longer dictate its behavior.

Update: Turns out that I’m not the only one thinking these thoughts.